Shahzia Sikander’s Transgressive Femininity
CINCINNATI and CLEVELAND — Last year, Shahzia Sikander created a trio of complementary works for her traveling career survey Collective Behavior, currently at the Cincinnati Art Museum and Cleveland Museum of Art. “Gendered Currents: Gopi Regatta,” “Ode to Venice,” and “Procession” — a graphite drawing, intaglio print, and mixed-media collage, respectively — all depict a group of female figures on a gondola, a reference to the show’s debut at the Venice Biennale last year. At the bow is the bust of a woman with braids shaped into horn-like spirals, echoing the water’s currents, the boat’s oars, and the artist’s 2023 public sculptures in New York and Houston — the latter of which was notoriously vandalized last July.
The figures in the gondola, as the drawing clarifies, are gopis, female cowherds devoted to the Hindu god Krishna and recurring presences in Sikander’s art. In Hindu theology, they exist as embodiments of selfless love for the singular god. Sikander first gave them their own narrative with her mixed-media drawing “Gopi Crisis” (2001). The composition depicts a cluster of the women surrounded by large, amorphous gray forms, circles of radiating dots, and what looks at first like a swarm of birds, but is actually the gopis’ hair flying off their heads in what might be considered an act of controlled chaos.
The elegant piece at once centers and disperses the image of the non-White, non-Western woman. Its style reflects the tradition of Indo-Persian miniature painting that the Pakistan-born artist studied at the National College of Arts in Lahore in the late 1990s, at a time when most students were focused on modern and avant-garde art, and the “neo-miniature” genre she subsequently pioneered. “As a young artist,” she said in conversation with Hyperallergic, “I [wanted to] study pictorial traditions that have an uneasy relationship with Western art history.”
Sikander subverted the art form by redefining the miniature through the lens of feminism. Yet in the United States, where she has lived since 1993, the “crisis” was, and still is, not just one of decentering patriarchal power. South and West Asian women have occupied a nebulous place in conversations about racial identity here. In 2001, this discourse became even more fraught as the US government and media villainized Brown and Muslim people in the “war on terror.”
In this light, the swarm of gopis, resistant to narrative cohesion or clear racial definition, their femininity uncontained yet marked as other, was doubly or triply transgressive. Today, neoliberal globalism has cleared a path for white supremacy to rear its head again; the world is perhaps no safer for the gopis, or Brown and Muslim women, than it was in 2001 — and the US is an especially precarious home. In the 2024 trio of works, however, the figures are calm and assured. Traveling across water — an entity that is, by its nature, ever-changing — they chart their own course on their own vessel, but embrace the flux. Likewise, the feminine, by its nature, is fluid in the face of barriers.
Together, the gopis from 2001 and 2024 define a woman as a social subject pushing back against marginalization or erasure, a disruptive feminine energy, and a flow that transcends and circumvents barriers. These themes recur throughout the Cincinnati Art Museum’s expanded version of Collective Behavior, curated by Ainsley M. Cameron, and an associated exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, curated by Emily Liebert. Likewise, these aspects of womanhood — the reality of the female-identifying social subject and the fluid force of the “feminine” — interweave with Sikander’s explorations of colonialism, feminism, and global politics that have informed her art and life for more than three decades.
In an interview in the Collective Behavior catalog, Sikander asks if an image can “refuse fixity.” Near the beginning of the exhibition are two early works: her undergraduate thesis project, “The Scroll” (1989–90), and a study for it. Expanding the flattened spaces typical of miniature painting across more than five feet, “The Scroll” depicts a diaphanous young woman weaving through her family home in Pakistan, finally reaching a canvas where she paints a self-portrait.
The painting, which was foundational to the neo-miniature genre, is endlessly compelling, not least due to what the artist calls the “displacement of scale” — the impossible unfolding of architecture and the figure’s dreamlike movement through it, which together create a sense that the work takes place across both space and time. Within this realm, the young woman is “claiming … the freedom of the body,” as Sikander says in a video about the painting, unconstrained by the laws of physics — and the laws of those in power. The work was in part a response to the Hudood Ordinances in Pakistan under the military dictatorship of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, which severely limited women’s rights. The vertical study is even more dizzying in its dislocation of time and space. Its repeated patterns and figures create a vertiginous visual cacophony that disallows the eye to settle, underscoring the convergence of vision and movement and foreshadowing Sikander’s later animations and mosaics.
Though the narrative of feminine spatial-social transgression is more evident in “The Scroll” than in the study, both illuminate the political critique embedded throughout the two exhibitions. Displacing scale and “defying bodily restrictions,” in her words, are imaginative acts that rupture repressive patriarchal and colonial narratives. The Cincinnati show establishes this position before visitors even enter. A golden sculpture of a woman, identical to one previously installed on the Manhattan Appellate Courthouse’s rooftop, and similar to a recurring feminine figure in her art, hovers atop a pink lotus flower outside of the galleries. She wears a jabot that refers to American Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, while the lotus, often appearing in Hindu iconography as a pedestal for deities, symbolizes wisdom.
A small gouache and gesso painting, “A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation” (1993), depicts a golden-yellow figure with breasts, rounded hips, and tendril-like arms and legs floating in an undefined black space — like the sculpture, but headless. In a catalog essay for Sikander’s 2022 exhibition Extraordinary Realities at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gayatri Gopinath writes that the silhouette “de-essentializes the female figure by blurring the boundary between human and nonhuman, plant and animal.” The figure also de-essentializes gender itself and, in doing so, occupies a femme space without acquiescing to the sociopolitical constraints of womanhood or ossifying into what we might imagine as a sexed, embodied human individual. This same figure emerges repeatedly in Sikander’s work, and it’s been considered in both positive and negative terms (the tendrils recall roots; the headlessness evokes violence). Both readings can coexist, but it seems likely that someone or something has hurt this being because history is a record of brutality against noncompliant women.
In the much larger acrylic painting “A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation II” (2000–2001), the figure has gained multiple arms that wield various weapons, a reference to the Hindu warrior goddess Durga. If the earlier one seemed detached and evasive, this one, now a watery orange-red against a beige ground, appears ready for a battle.
The work lays bare connections across history and mythology between women and monstrosity that have long fascinated the artist. Sikander opened a 2021 editorial for the New York Times by saying, “Being Asian-American — or Asian-anything — in the West often means living the paradox of being invisible while standing out.” The monstrous and grotesque feminine exists within this slippery cycle of hyper-visibility and erasure, but here, they become sources of strength, and proposals for women — particularly women of color — in the US to harness their powers of navigation.
The layering of mythology, history, and contemporary feminism are poetically condensed in the sculptural edition “Promiscuous Intimacies” (2020), on view in Cincinnati and Cleveland. The bronze work depicts an Indian Devata perched atop a Greco-Roman Venus, the two women entwined in a sensual embrace. The work brings queer desire into an art-historical sphere that excludes men; Sikander described it as “evok[ing] non-heteronormative desires that are often cast as foreign and inauthentic” while “disrupting taken-for-granted national, temporal, and art historical boundaries.” The fluidity of feminine energy in the artist’s work also opens up the possibility of the women as reflections of one another and, by extension, of their own multivalence.
In Cleveland, a smaller presentation brings Sikander’s relationship with historical art into focus by pairing her works with pieces from the museum’s South Asian collection. Her large mosaic, “Touchstone” (2021), is installed next to the painting “Uprooted Order” (1997), portraying two floating femme figures in a vertical embrace that recalls “Promiscuous Intimacies,” and a historical miniature painting attributed to Bishandas, “Nur Jahan holding a portrait of Emperor Jahangir” (c. 1627). In the 17th-century work, Nur Jahan, the Mughal emperor Jahangir’s favorite wife, who handled most state affairs, holds a portrait of him after his death; the painting may have symbolized her desire to remain in power. “Touchstone” shows an Indian woman in a similar composition attempting to hold a chalawa (a ghost or spirit). The relationship between the intangible spirit and the self is refracted through the brilliant play of glass shards and light; here, the woman herself becomes intangible and infinite.
Nearby is an 18th-century painting, “The Goddess Vajreshwari and Female attendants Boating in a Crimson Sea” (India, c. 1700–1725), hung next to “Ode to Venice,” one of the three images that opened this essay. The women in the earlier work may have charted a path that made way for Sikander’s painting, but by placing them together, the centuries collapse. What emerges is a continuum. The harder it is to see beyond the barriers of the moment, the more urgent Sikander’s art, and its radically transgressive feminine, becomes.
